Perfect
by itisimplicit
Summary: Quinn and Brittany and Santana are perfect. Except for when they're not. Character Study of the Unholy Trinity TW: Eating Disorders, Rape.


**Disclaimer: Not mine. Just trying to fill in the gaps. **

Quinn and Santana and Brittany are perfect. Except for when they're not, which is all the time now.

Santana is one of the star fliers on the Cheerios. She has a BMI of 14.6.

Brittany is beautiful and blonde and tall. She's been in therapy ever since Cheer Camp the summer before Freshman Year.

Quinn is going to Yale. She misses her child so much it almost hurts.

/

Santana is easily one of the golden girls at McKinley. She's on the Cheerios and in Glee and on the honour roll. She's popular and universally feared. Everyone secretly wants to be like her. She's beautiful. A little skinny, but gorgeous, with a set of definitely not real but still attractive rambunctious twins in residence on her rib cage. She's handled being outed surprisingly well, and if anything, has become even more popular with the football players as a result. The staff are treating her as a success and no one has any doubts that she will go on to achieve great things.

Santana is five foot five and weighs eighty-eight pounds. She likes that her weight reads the same backwards as it does forwards, and she works hard to keep it that way. She runs every morning, and subsists almost exclusively on Sue's master cleanse. Added to cheerleading practice that runs until dusk almost every night, it's easy. She's grown to accept the hunger pangs that pull across her body, making her almost double up in pain as she sprints for yet another lap. The dizziness that affects her during fourth period is almost welcome now. She wades into the fog and embraces it. It always clears by the time she takes a sip of water, anyway. The steady rest of the needle on the weighing scale makes her smile. It's something she can control in her steadily more messed up life.

When Brittany was being…Brittany last year, and asked her to sing that Melissa Etheridge song with her in front of everybody, she had gone to Breadstix and ate and ate. And then, when she got home, she got rid of it, pretending that her feelings for her were disappearing down the toilet bowl along with her vomit. It helped, just a little.

When Finn, the tactless whining pile of gas, had outed her to the whole of Ohio, she stopped eating for three days. It was something she could handle- the willpower required to turn down a bite of food- rather than the fact that all 11,544,951 people in her state would shortly find out that she was gay. Not eating was a lot less scary.

Being beautiful is important. Thin is beautiful. Santana is thin and beautiful, and she's the best flier in the cheerleading squad. If she was any heavier, she'd be less effective. Less useful. Less perfect. Less protected. She's Sue's ticket to Nationals, and if anyone lays a finger on her- for being gay, or in Glee, or for saying no to a football player- they'd be dead. The minute she leaves the protection of the squad, she's dead meat, and so is Brittany. To protect them both, Santana stays thin.

/

Brittany is promiscuous. Everyone agrees, but no one complains. They've all benefitted from her quest for a 'perfect record', some more than others. She's a sweetheart, an innocent and a little bit stupid. She's repeating senior year, and she has trouble with things like breakfast. But she can dance. She has an innate grace, and can master even the hardest of routines in what seems like a stupidly short amount of time- even faster than Mike. Everyone likes her. She's lovable. She's popular and people want to be her.

Brittany lost her virginity at cheerleading camp the summer before freshman year. A guy just climbed into her tent. Alien invasion, she calls it. She doesn't like the other word- the one her parents and the police and her therapist use. It's hard and sounds scary. It has a sharp p and starts with a growl like a bear. Rape. She hates that word. It's horrible. It didn't happen to her. It was an alien invasion. Sounds better.

Her therapist says the reason she slept around so much the first three years of high school was that she was trying to trivialise what happened to her. Brittany thinks she's probably right, but she doesn't really want to accept that. Sex is fun. She likes fun. But sex is better with feelings, and that's what she and Santana have. She doesn't sleep around as much anymore- unless you count doing it in lots of different places, because if you do, she's definitely slept around tons this last year.

Brittany was smart back in middle school. Like, really smart. Perfect GPA. But, now whenever she has tests and things, she's reminded of after the invasion, when she had to go to the police station and all those adults in uniforms and Coach Sue kept asking and asking her questions that she couldn't answer- that she didn't want to answer. This always makes her head go all squiggly and she can't remember anything and she just ends up drawing rainbows on her test papers and saying stupid stuff, like "Sometimes I can't remember my middle name." It calms her down.

Her parents read her diary. So does her therapist. It's to chart her recovery after the incident. To cheer her up once, her mom sat with Lord Tubbington on her lap and made it look like the cat was reading it. It made Brittany smile, and now whenever she gets flashbacks- like if the lunch lady is serving Jell-O, or if she's at the dentist, she thinks of him pretending to be a human and it goes away a little bit.

Brittany is tall and blonde and beautiful, and she's on the road to recovery. It's hard, but she's there.

/

Quinn Fabray is a success story. She is perfect. She has overcome. She's gone through more awful events in her short eighteen years than most people do in a lifetime, and she's still going to an Ivy League School. She can walk again. She helped Glee win Nationals, and she's still easily one of the most attractive people in the school. She's popular and funny and has charisma. People naturally want to follow her, worship her, be her. She's a cover-girl for hard work and never giving up, and the staff just knows that someday she will be a huge success.

Quinn has seen her daughter precisely six times since she gave her up. After the collapse of the Troubletones and the whole thing with Puck, Shelby had left Lima with Beth and had never come back. She hadn't expected it to hurt as much as it did. In her mind, during her pregnancy, she'd give birth, hand it over, and start again. Clean slate. Miss Perfect, yet again. It wasn't like that. Well, she did become Miss Perfect. Celibacy Club. Cheerios. Sam. But the ache for her child was so overwhelmingly painful that it came to take over her life.

The skank look she rocked was the only time she'd ever felt like herself. Her new friends accepted her pain, didn't try to hide it like her mother did. Slowly destroying her life was the only way she could make the agony leave.

She tried to get Beth back, and was dissuaded. Logically, it was the right thing to do, but she knows she's going to regret it for the rest of her life.

When she gets blindsided by that car on the way to Rachel's wedding, she thinks for a second that she's going to die and she's happy. At least then she won't have to think about Beth.

But she survives, and moves on and walks again, and the pain is always there. It'll never go away, not really. It's worse than her bones on wet days, and something no amount of morphine will ever dull. Yes, she's perfect, but she's hurting. Her blood is on fire with loss and it will never be extinguished. The only time it fades is when she sees Beth, and that doesn't happen anymore.

She's a shell, holding herself together, surfing on a sea of pain.

/

Quinn and Santana and Brittany are perfect, and no one really knows how deeply flawed they are.

They are Fools' Gold.


End file.
